Reflections of an Electronic Scribe: Two
Renaissance Dictionaries and Their Implicit Philosophies of
Language Jonathan Warren
University of Torontojwarren@chass.utoronto.ca

Warren, Jonathan.
"Reflections of an Electronic Scribe: Two Renaissance
Dictionaries and Their Implicit Philosophies of Language" Early
Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 1 (1997): 7.1-8
<URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-01/si-01warren.html>.

In 1616, the London publishing house of John Legatt
offered one of the earliest English dictionaries in
apparent wily recognition of a relatively new, though
remarkably ripe, market for what was quickly becoming
"a new genre of books": those targeted to
ease public confusion in the face of an extraordinary
early-seventeenth-century rise in neologisms derived
from Romance and Latinate sources (Schäfer,
"Re-Assessment" 31). Both the dictionary's
"Epistle Dedicatory to the Lady Jane
Viscountesse Mountagne" and the subsequent
"Address to the Courteous Reader" explain
that the volume is the product of individual labour
by a "Doctor of Physicke." The introductory
matter goes on to explain that John Bullokar's An
English Expositor was not intended for
publication, but for the private use of its compiler.
The prefatory remarks' implicit claim that the volume
was perhaps only a naive commercial gambit seems
unlikely to be wholly true; Bullokar, though
professionally identified as a man of science, was
importantly the son of the linguist William Bullokar
and, at least for this reason, on more intimate terms
with the new market than his remarks may seem to
admit (Schäfer, "Re-Assessment" 32, 35).[1] Bullokar's self-described
"little vocabulary Treatise" is the result
of its compiler's youthful efforts: it is an
unapologetically idiosyncratic blend, a selection of
words borne out of Bullokar's professional interest
in Physicke. It was, as well, a brilliant publishing
success that quickly became the standard against
which other similar efforts were to be judged for
almost half a century, enjoying 19 editions by 1775
(Schäfer, "Re-Assessment" 32, 45). There
is no evidence in the work of any governing principle
of dictionary creation that might, in turn, denote a
guiding philosophy of language. Or, rather, one might
say that Bullokar's dictionary does suggest such a
system to its readers, a latent or implicit system,
difficult to discern and at striking odds with the
desperate labours of John Minsheu that I will come to
in a moment.

Bullokar's dictionary bears a subtitle that claims a
high educative purpose for the work: "[t]eaching
the interpretation of the hardest words used in our
language with sundry explications, descriptions, and
discourses." But to the extent that his
dictionary was, in fact, the personal vocabulary list
of a single medical practitioner, it hardly seems
ready to fit such a bill. The subtitle, at odds as it
is with the prose of the compiler, seems likely a
device concocted for its marketing value rather than
for its accuracy. Or perhaps, the subtitle is the
genuine expression of the compiler's belief that the
language's hardest words are those drawn from the
scientific discipline in which he excelled. If this
is the case, Bullokar claims largely for the practice
of physicke the language's hardest words, English's
thorniest understandings: a parochial tendency within
the professions, of course, neither novel, nor
obsolete, nor restricted to medical doctors.[2]

Bullokar's dictionary does not claim for itself a
thoroughness or, even, a system that aims at
exhaustiveness. The very idea of what a
"complete" dictionary might be for each of
the two dictionary compilers I recall here--whose
work I spent more than the past year transcribing
into tagged computer-legible files--seems to me,
after accruing familiarity with their works, the most
provocative question. The principle of selection in
Bullokar's dictionary is centered, as I have
suggested, in the loose medical--and other archaic
scientific and natural--curricula of Renaissance
physicke. The words he chose to include in his
dictionary are words he would have used.[3]
They are words with which Bullokar's layman
contemporaries would have been unfamiliar--or, if
they had heard the words, they would have merely
connected them to the esoteric zone of Physicke. The
mysteriousness or hardness of the terms chosen marked
them for selection by Bullokar. Bullokar's entry for
"camphor" is typical of his talents of
explication as well as of the limits to those
talents:

Camphire. A kinde of Gumme, as Auicen writeth.
But Platearius affirmeth it to be the iuice of an
herbe. It is white of colour, and cold and dry in
operation.

Bullokar's dictionary is rife with descriptions of
minerals, earths, metals, juices, draughts, gums,
extracts, syrups, curatives, purgatives, potions,
poisons, fruits, nuts, and all manner of fatal
illness and merely very unpleasant ailment. As with
the entry for camphor just noted, Bullokar does not
treat these terms as the material of language.
Indeed, there is scant evidence throughout Bullokar's
volume that he conceived of the words that named
these fascinating and often exotic substances as
constituting a currency all their own. Bullokar
always cuts swiftly to the pragmatic application of
the named thing: bad to eat, good for stopping the
runs, will kill you quickly, costs a lot, and so on.
The extent to which Bullokar acknowledges what we
might recognize as akin to modern etymology is his
recognition of classical scientific source material:
in the case of camphor, Avicen may say it is a gum,
and Platearius may say it is a juicy liquid, but
Bullokar typically avoids further specificity and
safely avers that its colour is white, and that it is
cold and dry in operation.[4]
Bullokar's idiosyncratic selectivity--largely brought
to bear on what words enter his lexicon at
all--exerts itself, in this way, within his
definitions themselves.

It would be wrong of me to claim that Bullokar limits
himself to the specialized scientific vocabulary of
his profession. Clearly, these words receive
preference in this dictionary. Yet he finds a place
for other words that do not seem so alien to
non-scientific usage. But I also do not want to risk
suggesting, at random, a sort of dividing line
between scientific and non-scientific vocabulary for
Bullokar. Such a claim, I think, would demand
contextual research into the history of scientific
professionalization. Bullokar's An English
Expositor documents the establishment of the
boundaries of its compiler's speciality. Bullokar's
manifest interest in divination--an entry for which
he inscribes his longest explanation--helps describe
the frontiers of Renaissance Physicke. The manner of
Bullokar's definition may seem to share with our
current practices a certain "scientific"
approach: he anatomizes the field of divination into
three "kindes," the name and order of which
are curious and telling: first supernatural, second
natural, and third superstitious. He further
subdivides natural divination into two branches.
Superstitious divination, for which he reserves the
most disrespect, also receives the lion's share of
his attention: he divides this aberrant form of
prediction into eleven diverse kinds. The lengthy and
circuitous explanations that Bullokar assigns to
these carefully reduced elements constitute the
compiler's only kind of thoroughness--one that
alternately praises and condemns various practices of
prophecy and divination, but one devoid of specific
reference to the language that names these practices
as such.

John Minsheu's Dictionarie in Spanish and English
was published in London by Edmund Bollifant in 1599.
It is a revision and expansion of an earlier, similar
effort by Richard Percivale.[5]
Minsheu, unlike Bullokar, was a Professor of
Languages, an academic with a professional interest
in the nature of words themselves.[6]
Minsheu, unlike Bullokar, seems not to have come to
dictionary production serendipitously, but through
lengthy, purposeful, and--he pleads--unpleasant
arduousness. Minsheu calls his task "the most
unprofitable and unpleasant studie of searching words
for a Dictionarie" and, later, explains that he
has offered a "candle to light others, and burne
out my selfe . . ." (2) In his Address to the
Reader, Minsheu furthers this sense of industrious
despair by projecting a kind of persecutorial stance
onto his readership. He identifies three types of
readers: the good, the bad, and the indifferent, and
thus begins his dictionary by pitting two thirds of
his public against him before proceeding to protest
his worthiness against these imagined bad and
indifferent readers: his mistakes were not really his
own; he was unduly rushed; the printers most likely
made errors that he could not correct because he was
out of town. He would do it differently if he had it
to do over, if he chose to do it at all.

In addition to the repeated protestations of
suffering and the various strategies he devises to
seek out the pity and sympathy of his patrons and
readers--rhetorical passages that continue to prove
magnetic to me by virtue of the sheer scale of
despair they catalogue in the midst of his
labours--Minsheu's introductory remarks call
attention to the real scale of his achievement.
Minsheu, in order to document the innovations of his
own volume over those of Percivale's original, marks
each of his additions to Percivale's dictionary with
an asterisk. That is, every entry that does appear in
the Minsheu dictionary that did not appear in the
Percivale work is preceded by an attention-nabbing
star. Minsheu, in this way, notes his advances in
completeness while advertising the sizable portion of
the dictionary that represents the fruit of his
professedly miserable struggles in the lexical field.
In addition, Minsheu provides a pronunciation system
for every word by means of accent marks. He expands
upon Percivale's system of definition by providing
what he calls "diverse significations for
selfsame words": an innovative approach to what
we might call multi-referential terms that Percivale
apparently did not employ. Minsheu would not call
these words multi-referential. Rather, Minsheu seems
somewhat troubled by the fact that some various
things have the same name. Indeed, Minsheu sometimes
distinguishes between these identical names by
various accented punctuation, perhaps in order to
make the names of distinct things themselves
distinct. Furthermore, Minsheu expands the range of
his dictionary beyond singular words by citing what
he calls "diverse hard and uncouth phrases"
(phrases like "ay, ay, ay" meaning
"oh, oh, oh"-- that Minsheu includes
immediately after his definition of the singular word
"ay" as "oh"--really do not seem
worth the extra print).

Minsheu, unlike Bullokar who followed him, seems to
have favoured no quadrant of language over others.
His words are drawn from no dominant professional
vocabulary. Indeed, Minsheu's slippery goal of a
thoroughgoing, complete dictionary--that is to say a
dictionary that lists and tries to explain the names
of all things--seems not only to be what marks
his style of lexical work, but the vexing root of his
unhappiness in the midst of the task. More often than
not, Minsheu's quest for a complete account of
Spanish words in English reveals an understanding of
the nature of language itself: an understanding that
differs from the easy idiosyncracy and occasional
topical exhaustiveness that I registered in Bullokar
and very curious in its own way. Minsheu
demonstrates, in his dictionary, that he supposes
that with sufficient stamina and tenacity, all words
may be accounted for. He pursues this awesome task by
energetically listing all words without allowing the
relatedness of words to assist him in the task. What
does this mean? How does this work? As my colleagues
in the Early Modern English Dictionary project at the
University of Toronto can attest, I remarked
repeatedly on Minsheu's practice of devoting whole
pages of his dictionary to variations on animal
names: goats, geese, lambs, mules, donkeys, horses,
and so on. Though these pages made transcription
monotonous, on its own Minsheu's practice does not
seem particularly remarkable. Indeed, many of these
entries were in Percivale's original. What Minsheu
adds is all manner of variation to these entries: big
goat, little goat, place of big goats, place of
little goats, a he goat, a she goat, a place of he
goats, a place of she goats, and so on.[7]
The practice is the same for plant names and all
other words.[8] Minsheu
handles each of these entries distinctly. His
cross-references, indications of the relatedness of
the words, are rarely reasoned and usually haphazard.
For Minsheu, prefixes function to vary lemma
placement on the basis of spelling; his methods
indicate no appreciation for the power of prefixes
and suffixes to vary the meaning of a lexical root.
Minsheu's exhaustive practice of inclusion of all
forms seems very cumbersome when used to account for
verbs. Minsheu offers full declensions for hard and
irregular verbs. Often he provides independent
entries for every form of a verb--tenses,
declensions, gerunds--sometimes with and sometimes
separated from the entry for the infinitive form of
the verb. Minsheu, in this way, suggests a
theoretical tendency in his work. Language, in
Minsheu's dictionary, is not a flexible economy of
free-floating and ever-evolving signs. Such a
suggestion would not only seem very foreign to
Minsheu, but his introductory remarks reveal that he
certainly did not possess the emotional grit to face
such a protean beast. Minsheu evinces a faith,
rather, that language--given sufficient energy and
financial support--is fully documentable, that it
does not randomly tag but that it adheres
inextricably to the specific thing named.

Bullokar's emphasis on the practical value of hard
terms is only a rejection of the intellectual
interest of words themselves, if we subject the
compiler to a standard alien to his practice.
Practical application is Bullokar's notion of
the intellectual value of vocabulary. In contrast,
Minsheu's ideology spurs a method apparently
determined to explicate the tools of communication
without concern for any extension into the realm of
utility, and with thoroughness and wisdom. For this
reason, we may be forgiven for mistaking Minsheu's
appreciation as close to our valuation of language,
signification, and etymology. Minsheu's explicit
interest in plenty, however, marks him as a stranger
to that standard as well. That Minsheu's gathering of
language's bounty necessarily yields a display of
word parts, roots, meaningful attachments, and
conjugations, is a happy accident of his anxious
method; his haphazard recognition of the
relationships among words underscores this point.
Minsheu's ample presentation of lexical forms may
seem to authorize him as a philosopher of language.
Nevertheless, Minsheu's product, though valuable to
such philosophers, is the detritus of a promotional
scheme more akin to Bullokar's glamourization of hard
words than to our interest in understanding the
functions of language.

Notes

1. Schäfer remarks: "It
is possible that William Bullokar bequeathed to his son
the idea for a dictionary and some material; in final
concept and execution the work has to be considered
Bullokar's own" ("Re-Assessment" 35).

2. On the expression,
"hard words": Jürgen Schäfer has pondered the
historically precise weight and import of the expression,
an effort curiously neglected by historians of word usage
until his instructive comments. Schäfer notes that
"hard words" at the time of these early
dictionaries or word lists "denote any kind of word,
old or new--even proper names, which might present
difficulties in understanding" (Schäfer
"Re-Assessment" 34) and not old words,
"new-fangle" words, or foreign words
exclusively (34, 46). And, as Schäfer indicates,
Bullokar draws from all these fields. Bullokar's volume
does nevertheless tend to enact a less generalized
appreciation of the "hard words" range of
implication. That is, though drawn from the old and the
new and the alien, Bullokar does favour the technical
terms rooted in the practice of physicke. For more on the
novelty of Bullokar's subject matter as contrasted to his
contemporaries and precursors, see Schäfer's
"Re-Assessment," especially pages 33 and 35-39.

3. For further acknowledgement
of the striking novelty of Bullokar's inclusion of
professional vocabulary in the context of contemporary
lexicographical work, see Schäfer
("Re-Assessment" 35).

4. For a brief characterization
of the Renaissance practice of etymologia as it
differs from our methods (with particularly helpful
reference to period dictionary methodological evidence),
see Schäfer's persuasive revaluation of Minsheu's Ductor
in Linguas ("Scholar or Charlatan?" 25-26).

5. The title page of Minsheu's
dictionary gives primacy to his debt to "Ric.
Perciuale Gent." but quickly moves past
advertising his antecedents in favour of featuring his
own accomplishments. Indeed, were it not for the
reference to Percivale on the title page, Minsheu's
uninformed reader might not appreciate the breadth of the
compiler's obligation. In fact, Minsheu's dictionary
offers:

a surprisingly small number of words which
Percyvall had not entered in some form or other. Yet
Minsheu achieves a fivefold increase in the number of
entries over Percyvall. The increase largely results
from the introduction of new forms for words already
present in Percyvall, i.e. variant spellings and
derived forms, and the inclusion of an
English-Spanish part made up largely of words
reversed from the Spanish-English part. (Steiner 42)

For more on Minsheu's motives for denying his
precursors their due and his interesting and antagonistic
relationship with Percivale, his other contemporary
colleagues, and his adversaries, see Steiner (41-42, 51).

6. Despite Minsheu's nominal
qualifications contra Bullokar, one would be wise
to consult Schäfer's Introduction to Ductor in
Linguas to understand the nature and extent of
Minsheu's professional expertise. Schäfer explains, in
short, that "Minsheu is not a theoretician or
learned scholar but a practical teacher of
languages" ("Introduction" xi).

7. In addition to the multiple,
related, but often non-cross-referenced forms already
mentioned, consider Minsheu's extraordinary decision to
rehearse a huge number of lemmas with an antonymic prefix
attached. For more on Minsheu's introduction of multiple
forms--sometimes instructive and helpful, often seemingly
for the sake of quantity only--see Steiner (45).

8. Steiner elaborates this
point: "A lack of method is evident when two or more
words or variants of the same meaning are to be ordered
alphabetically. They may be included in the same entry,
e.g., `Vejés, or Vejez, age, old age.' Or
one may be cross-referenced to the other . . . . Or each
may be listed in its place in the alphabet with its
variant and gloss [without cross-referencing]"
(46-47).

Bibliography

Bullokar, John. An English Expositor: teaching the
interpretation of the hardest words in our language.
[London:] J. Legatt, 1616.